DevDays Roundup

I was speaking at DevDays Dublin this week. There lots of good talks given, and I thought a round up would be a good idea
The day kicked off with a talk from Paul Burford of Apple. Interestingly, Apple rarely come to events such as this one, and as far as I can tell, this is because they like to give developer talks with ADC members only. This means that they have an audience who are bound by Apple’s NDA, and so can give out snippets of secret information.
As this was not the case, there was no secrets coming out of Paul; He gave a long and detailed talk about the app store, what made apps popular, and touched off some of the requirements for app store approval. He also gave a good round-up of the toolchain used for iPhone development.
My talk was next. Obviously I’m not going to review it. I knew I’d be repeating many of the points that Paul had done, but hopefully they were seen from a developer’s perspective as opposed to Apple policy. Here’s the slides I did, but they really need the commentary to make sense of them.

After the break, we had a talk given by Giacomo Duranti on localisation and internationalisation. Some very interesting points here. Giacomo talked through some of the practicalities of localisation and internationalisation and why you should do it. This echoed some sentiments given by Paul of Apple; By localising your apps, you can double their sales. Spanish in particular will open your app to Spain and Southern American markets.
Des Traynor was next up on User Experience. I’ve seen different guys from Contrast give talks at a couple of events now. I gotta admire their passion for what they do. Their presentations are always engaging and its clear that they truly believe in what they do. This talk was no different.
Next up was a talk on connected health, given by David Doherty of 3gdoctor. David gave lots of insights into this area; Much of it is about having medical information “on demand”, and while not iPhone specific, I’m sure would have given the audience plenty of ideas.
The last speaker was Ron Immink of smallbusinesscan.com. Ron’s comments were about the challenges of starting a small business, and what smallbusinesscan brings to the party. It was a very positive talk given in these challenging times and those who are in varied stages of growth could do worse than sign up to Ron’s service.
The day concluded with a panel Q&A session, which was chaired by Anton Mannering of the Digital Media Forum. Anton proved to be a great facilitator, who had plenty of insights to add to the discussion. I expected this session to be short and sweet as it was the end of a long day, and numbers had started to dwindle. However it was a lively enough affair, with plenty of great questions. Many of course were directly aimed at Apple themselves, which Paul fielded well; Some he had to decline to answer, but this is to be expected. Apple never talk about future direction, etc., and it wasn’t going to change at an event they were invited to as opposed to one they were hosting themselves.
The highlights of the day for me were meeting Xcakers I’d only talked to via twitter, getting some nuggets about how some apps are developed, (In a nutshell: Think about the user interface and experience first; then do it again; then take half of it out lather, rinse, repeat. Then code.) and meeting plenty of new people at different stages of iPhone development.
Overall, there are a number of people to be commended on DevDays. The idea was first mooted I’d say 3-4 weeks before the event. Matt Johnston of Momentum NI was the main instigator. Fred Herrera of Create Ireland and Anton Mannering of Digital Media Forum pulled things together in Dublin. Steven Troughton-Smith, a prominent XCake member put together the DevDays website (in a few hours!)
Were you there? Feel free to add your own comments

Hi Jon,
If you’re asking can the app have different titles in different Itunes stores, the answer is yes. In fact, outside of your app itself, (which of course can support localised strings, etc.), you can translate the name and the description. You can also set language specific application URL, support URL, support e-mail address and the uploaded images.
– Dermot.

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